Ionia maggot farmer raises millions

He sells his crop for bait.

He sells his crop for bait.

December 25, 2005|BOB GWIZDZ Booth Newspapers

ORLEANS, Mich. (AP) -- Like many farmers, Herb Seibelman gets started with his chores at the crack of dawn. Unlike many farmers, he harvests his crop daily, putting it in cold storage until the market for it develops, as it will, in the months ahead. Freshness isn't a concern. Kept at temperatures in the mid to upper 30s, Seibelman's product will last almost indefinitely, he says. Long enough, at any rate, to provide seed for next fall's crop. But Seibelman, 67, doesn't produce fruit or vegetables, grain or livestock. And although his crop is used as a feed-product, it won't be used in any other agricultural activity, but rather as an important part of a pastime. Seibelman raises maggots, commonly known in ice-fishing parlance as "spikes," or, perhaps a bit more technically accurate, fly larva. Not just any fly larva, Seibelman says; he produces larva from large blow flies, bigger than your run-of-the-mill house flies, so they produce bigger than your run-of-the-mill maggots. "I try to produce a good bait," said Seibelman, who has been growing fly larva -- he calls them "bugs" -- commercially since the early 1970s. His operation is in Ionia County, about 30 miles east of Grand Rapids. The key, Seibelman said, is providing them plenty of food. So Seibelman maintains a massive feed pile -- made up primarily of road-killed deer carcasses and what's left of deer after meat processors get through with them. The longer they are fed, "the bigger they get," Seibelman said. "They just gorge themselves, basically." Big is the operative word. Seibelman likes his spikes big enough to offer fish a meal. After he's harvested his crop, he sorts it with a strainer. Any "bugs" that fall through the screen are rejected. "I hate to see somebody out fishing without good bait," Seibelman said. In a given year, Seibelman will raise some 10 million spikes. He gets only a fraction of a fraction of a penny apiece for them -- he sells them to distributors in lots of 25,000 -- so volume is a key to his business. It's all about timing, Seibelman says. Start too early in the year, he says, and the local flies will take over your feed pile. He needs cool weather -- "colder weather seems to produce a bigger bug," he says -- but not so cold that the flies freeze. "If it gets too cold, there's no flies," he said. "If there's no flies, there's no eggs, there's no bugs." This fall has been a difficult one for Seibelman, who says on his best day ever, he produced about a million and a half bugs. The unusually warm autumn not only set back his planting season -- Seibelman begins by letting about 100,000 of last year's larvae loose in the feed pile -- but it's made it hard for him to come up with the deer parts he needs for feed. Seibelman stores his bugs in a walk-in cooler in large aluminum wash tubs. He keeps somewhere between 75,000 to 85,000 in a tub full of saw dust. Too many in a tub and they start to die. "I don't like dead ones in my buckets," he said. "Nothing lives in its own dead. Not even maggots."